13 mins., colour, silent with English inter titles
Source : accompanied by ethnographic notes, this film is viewable here, where it is also downloadable. A version without ethnographic notes is available on YouTube here.
Unfortunately, these versions appear to have been transferred to a digital format at an incorrect speed. Ursula Graham Bower would have shot her material at 16-18fps, which was the standard speed for 16mm cameras in the 1930s, but it would appear that this material has been transferred at the more recent standard of 24 or 25fps, with the result that the movements of the subjects are unnaturally rapid.
Content : although this material has clearly been edited, and there are some carefully made inter titles, there is no principal title, nor credits. Graham Bower’s field diaries indicate that this is the first material that she shot on colour film, which was the then relatively recently released Kodachrome.
The topics that she covers are not ambitious. The first shot shows people walking along a road in a town, probably an experimental shot before she left for the field. Thereafter, there is an intimate scene of her Naga porters inspecting her camera bag, as well as some more ethnographic, though brief, sequences of weaving, boys wrestling and some girls singing. There is a more extended sequence of a mock head-hunting raid, while the footage ends with some competitive spear-throwing.
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